There is a new product called Rokid Max that is a pair of glasses which presents a screen image, replacing a monitor. They claim it is equivalent to a 215" screen at 6 meters. I asked about this, and got a response. I haven’t be able to figure out if that person is a power user, or a company rep.
So how does it present an image 2" from your eyes that your eyes perceive as being 6 meters away? I am not talking about parallax, I am talking about focal distance. Does this work the same way as how the DMV tests your vision on little box? (I don’t know how that works either.)
Me:
Thanks for the responses. That’s the same resolution as my 24" desktop monitor. So claiming a 215" virtual screen as seen from 6 meters (about 20 feet) is pretty much the same virtual image as sitting at my desk looking at my monitor. Claiming a huge screen size without greater resolution is a bit hyperbolic. I mean, they could say it’s a 60-foot screen as seen from a mile away.
Response:
Actually it is not hyperbolic, it means you can relax your eyes. If it was 21.5" from 0.6m distance instead, even though it would be of the same size visually, it would mean you have to both focus and converge your eyes on a close object, which would cause eye strain.
The only reason why 215" screens are rare because they would be huge, expensive and heavy. But for a virtual screen, it makes sense to make it big at sufficiently big distance to increase eye comfort.
I’m not seeing any claims or explanations at the link, just an option to buy. Is there more somewhere else?
This seems to be about the 4th generation for their monitor-replacement glasses, based on their “about Rokid” page. That doesn’t help me much if I were interested.
215" is almost 18 feet. 6 meters is almost 20 feet. We have a room that is 20 feet long and about 14 feet wide. The hypotenuse of the end wall, 8’x14’, is only 193.5", so this hypothetical screen would be larger than an 8’x14’ wall. At 20 feet away, it seems I would be moving my eyes around more to take it all in, even if the scale were the same, but it’s hard to be sure. I would sure want to try it out before shelling out almost $500 to “relax my eyes.”
I wonder if the glasses incorporate a blue filter like my eyeglasses do, to further relax the eyes from screen glare.
It has a lens system. It’s the same principle as how a pair of eyeglasses can refocus an object at 10 meters so that janky eyeballs that can’t focus past 10 cm can see it sharply.
Lenses like this won’t change the field of view much. And it sounds like they basically “focus at infinity”, which is what your eyeballs are doing for anything past about 5 meters. Whether that means a 3 meter screen at 5 m or a 3 km screen at 5 km is basically irrelevant at this point–your eyes can’t tell the difference. But it is different from a 3 cm screen at 5 cm, which you probably can’t focus on at all. And it may be more comfortable than a 30 cm screen at 50 cm, depending on your preference.
If you find watching TV in your living room more comfortable than looking at a normal computer monitor, but want to use it in more cramped situations (say, on an airplane), something like this may be useful. No idea about the quality of this particular product.
If I’m understanding correctly, this similar to how virtual reality headsets work. When wearing a VR headset, you’re looking at a screen that’s a couple of inches away from your eye. It would be difficult or impossible to focus on a screen so close to your eye without an intervening lens. The “focus at infinity” lens between your eye and the screen allows your eye’s lens to relax the way it does when it’s looking at something far away, but still focus on the screen that’s only a couple of inches away.
But my understanding is that this focus issue is actually a big part of why some people get headaches using VR–that you will naturally try to change the focus in your eyes when things appear closer.
I also understand that VR glasses generally are not at high enough resolution to work as a virtual monitor. Ideally, you don’t see individual pixels when looking at a monitor. But It very much sounds like the OP would be able to see very large pixels, given the resolution and apparent size.
That’s the “vergence-accommodation conflict”. It’s only an issue with stereoscopic imagery, where some objects in the scene appear closer due to the parallax effect. It’s not an issue for a big virtual screen where everything is at the same distance.
VR resolution is a problem because of the high field of view, say 100+ degrees. But a virtual monitor isn’t going to be presented at such a high field of view, in the same way that your normal computer monitor doesn’t typically fill your entire field of view.
I was presuming that a virtual monitor would appear stationary. It sounds like you’re saying it would appear to move when you move your head. Thus you would never be able to move your head to focus on a different part of the monitor. I have a smaller monitor (19") and sit further away than most people do to their screen, and I still have to move my head to focus on different parts of the monitor.
Not being able to change my head position relative to the virtual monitor would thus seem to be a problem.
I was under the impression that the limiting factor of VR resolution was pixel density. A smaller field of view would, I presume, mean a smaller screen.
I’m aware monitors don’t fill your entire field of view, but their screens are also much larger than any type of “glasses” could be. Hence they can have a much lower pixel density than something only a couple of inches from your eye.
1/3 of the way down the page is an image of a woman pointing at a large screen with a photo of a rowboat on the water. In the upper left corner of that image it says:
This is a good point. I never thought about it but now that I’m aware of it, I do move my head when I want to look at anything outside the central area of my monitor. Not much, but with the glasses it would have to be zero.
You’re expected to move your eyeballs. I’m certain that the linked glasses don’t have any head tracking. The screen is fixed in front of you.
“Virtual desktop” VR software doesn’t do this–it works like you’re sitting there at your desk, and can look around by moving your head. So you can put a bunch of virtual monitors or other screens in your environment and it’s like you have lots of real-world screens.
But pixel density is a problem. If a screen takes up 30 degrees, and the VR headset is 120 degrees, then to render all the pixels in a 19x10 screen requires each eye in VR to be 8k. That’s a lot!
And it’s worse than that, because of resampling–the fact that you aren’t sitting exactly in front of it, with a 1:1 pixel mapping. So really you should add 2x on top of that, or at least run your virtual desktop with a high scaling factor (make all the fonts, etc. at 200% size).
The linked glasses don’t have the scaling problem, and only render the pixels necessary for the screen (no background stuff, no extra screens, etc.). So 19x10 displays are enough, and it can pick the size they show up at. It’s always at 1:1 so it’s a clean image. But the pixels will likely be bigger than your want (i.e., it’ll look grainy), and you will have to move your eyes to see everything.
LOL
I freaked out my techs when I asked for them to take the lenses, give me a ground central area for close work, and the perimeter rim ground for distance. [the central ground area is the normal prescription grinding tool size, roughly ovoid, slightly larger than an almond]
See, I use them for my laptop, but I also want to watch television, so I have the ground for close area set to where the top edge of grind is where the top edge of the laptop screen is in my field of vision, and the distance part perfectly lets me flip my eyes up without moving my head. The tablet I have my security camera feed on, hits just at the corner of my close vision, and hte grind is such that I can see what my camera feed is telling me.
I could almost be paralized and not able to move anything other than my hands for typing and my eyes and be functional =)
I can’t see why I would want these funky monitor replacement glasses =)
In that spot “DoF” is almost certainly “Degrees of Freedom”. As in the tracker can track when you turn your head left or right, up or down, or tilted side to side.
DoF indeed means degrees of freedom, i.e. yaw/pitch/roll in this case. But useful VR/AR tracking needs 6 DoF, and it needs to have zero drift. They generally achieve this with either some outside trackers mounted to the room and determining where the headset is, or via cameras on the headset pointing out and determining where the room is relative to it (called inside-out tracking). Either way, you get a rigid, accurate 6 DoF tracking system.
These glasses have none of that; instead they just embedded a standard MEMS IMU (inertial measurement unit), like any phone would have. I don’t know what they think it’s useful for, but it’s not anything directly AR/VR related.
